Kentucky's Jail-Less Jailers Get Paid to Do Nothing

Kentucky has 41 counties with no county jail, but the state constitution requires all counties to have an elected county jailer. So, 41 county jailers get paid, often handsomely, to do nothing. The highest earner among them pulls down $69,000 a year, but she has no office, no schedule, and no official duties of any kind.

These counties are some of the poorest in the state, but they collectively spend about $2 million dollars a year on salaries for jailers-without-porforlio and their deputies.

Last of the "Murrow Boys" Dies at 97

Richard C. Hottelet, a war correspondent who covered the Normandy invasion and the Battle of the Bulge for CBS, has died at the age of 97.

Hottelet was the last surviving member of the “Murrow Boys,” a team of correspondents originally assembled by Edward R. Murrow before the Second World War. Hottelet joined the team in 1944 to cover the invasion of Normandy.

Tennessee Criminalizes Drug Use During Pregnancy, Tragedies Ensue

One of the first women arrested under Tennessee’s new law that criminalizes women who give birth to babies with drugs in their systems took her own life last month, Rosa Goldensohn and Rachael Levy report in the Nation:

At around midnight on November 13, Tonya Martin slipped out into the yard that separated her trailer from the one in which her grandparents live on a lot in the eastern hills of Tennessee. Just two months earlier, the Monroe County Sheriff’s Department arrested Martin after she gave birth to a son. Her crime: delivering a child at Sweetwater Hospital with drugs—some kind of opioid—in his system.

Martin couldn’t shake her addiction or the depression that plagued her. The 34-year-old mother gave up the newborn for adoption. Not long after, Martin’s boyfriend found her dangling from the clothesline pole in her grandmother’s yard. He tried to resuscitate her, but it was too late. [The Nation]

The law was billed as an incentive for pregnant drug users to get treatment for their addictions before their babies were born, but because of Tennessee’s overcrowded, underfunded treatment system, many pregnant women who want help are being turned away. One woman who was denied drug treatment ultimately gave birth to her daughter in a car by the side of the road Goldensohn and Levy report. A doctor who works with pregnant addicts said that he knows some of his patients have fled the state to deliver and others have told him they’re going into hiding.

A bill that was touted as an incentive for healthy behavior is turning into a public health nightmare for women, their babies, and the community.

Greg Palast wins the December Sidney Award for “Jim Crow Returns,” and “Challenging Crosscheck,” a two-part Al Jazeera America exposé that shows how millions of innocent people were flagged as suspected vote fraudsters just because they have the same first and last name as someone in another state.

On the eve of the 2014 elections, officials had begun to purge voters based upon Interstate Crosscheck, voter fraud prevention software. More than 40,000 voters were dropped from the rolls in Virginia alone.

As Palast and I discuss in our Backstory interview, Crosscheck-induced purges may have already tipped the balance of power in some closely-fought senate races this election cycle, and the purging is only just beginning. Expect it to be even further along by 2016.

December 9, 2014

Tales from the Grand Jury Room

What is it like to serve on a grand jury? Lots of people are suddenly curious after grand juries in Ferguson, MO and Staten Island, NY failed to indict police officers for killing unarmed black men.

Misha Leptic of 3QuarksDaily recalls his experiences as a grand juror in New York City:

Eventually, in the course of our daily proceedings a curiously adversarial dynamic developed. As a jury, we did our best to establish a solid understanding of what transpired for any given case. But much of it felt like being in Plato’s cave. We only saw what the prosecutors and police wanted us to see, and would further guide us, as much as possible, in how to see it. Due to the confidential nature of the proceedings, note-taking was prohibited. And without the counterbalancing presence of a defense counsel, or of the salutary effects of cross-examination, the end result was, more often than not, a shrug of the shoulders and a vote to indict. [3QD]

Leptic concludes that, “[i]f the purpose of the system is to generate indictments, then the system works really well. Hence the well-known quote from chief justice Wachtler about the indictability of ham sandwiches.”

If it’s that easy for a semi-motivated prosecutor to get an indictment at a low standard of proof in an unopposed proceeding, it really makes you wonder why the police officer who choked Eric Garner walked free and the guy who filmed the attack got indicted on an ostensibly unrelated charge. It’s all about priorities.